All you need is an editor who pressures a journo into writing a piece of knocking copy on ecigs and this is what you get. The media get a lot of cash from pharma advertising, and this is the kind of thing they request, judging by the result (and by the appalling junk science 'research' on ecigs that pharma regularly funds). Then bingo! You get "ecigs will kill you in 2 weeks flat" or whatever rubbish they can come up with.
There's always a commercial reason for this stuff, or the writer is resident in Ward 16, Bellevue. No sane or honest person would turn out this kind of stuff.
If you want the facts:
- To date 9,600 compounds have been identified in tobacco/smoke (Rodgman, Perfetti 2013). The concept that ecigs can somehow equal or exceed this is about the same as Obama is a Martian and Congress is comprised of lizard creatures from the planet Zog. (Although, sometimes...)
- Ecig vapour has five basic ingredients that are all known to be harmless and have been inhaled in medicines without consequence for decades: four in the refills (PG, VG, nicotine, flavouring), plus water (either in the refill and/or combining with water in the inhaled/exhaled breath produced by the lungs); see it on any frosty morning, it's always there but usually invisible.
- Some flavourings are known without doubt to be harmless since they are licensed for medical inhalation and have been inhaled for decades. The concept that 'all flavourings are harmful' is rubbish. Some may have a dozen or more constituents, though; but none have been shown as carcinogenic.
- Several more compounds may be created at trace levels by the heating process within an atomiser causing breakdown effects (degrading). The levels will approximate those within medicines and are regarded as inconsequential in those products. Because the dose makes the poison, with any toxin including carcinogens, microscopic amounts of anything are deemed insignificant.
How many compounds can be found in ecig vapour?
It's very hard indeed to conceive of a situation where ecig vapour might contain over 50 compounds, even with a complicated Dekang recipe using up to two dozen synthetic ingredients to replicate a complex natural flavour; and although heating can create breakdown compounds by thermal degradation, this is only in trace quantities with normal use of normal equipment.
It's entirely possible to run a lab process (not really a 'test' or 'experiment' since no human could inhale the result without choking) where the hardware is made to deliberately burn up the refill at ultra-high temperatures. Since no one can inhale choking, toxic smoke, this is not really much use for any purpose except lurid gutter journalism or use by pharma shills in the Public Health industry, who can try to convince the gullible that vapers inhale materials equivalent to a fire in a dumpster.
For all practical purposes, ecig vapour normally contains less than 30 compounds in a low-temperature water-based mist. All of the compounds present in significant amounts have been and will be inhaled by medicinal inhaler users for decades. As a good example of this, asthma inhalers usually employ PG as the excipient; asthmatics have been inhaling PG multiple times daily for at least four decades and so far nobody has reported any problem.
Fraudulent claims
1. Therefore, trying to claim that (a) no one knows what the effects of inhaling PG over the long term are, or (b) that the normal ingredients in ecig refills have some kind of potential for unknown risk is simply an outright lie; or a statement by someone who doesn't know anything about the subject.
2. Trying to claim that trace materials are a serious threat is either (a) an outright lie, or (b) a statement by someone without the smallest knowledge of toxicology or oncology. The dose needs to be significant before any effect can be seen. Even Swedish Snus has no statistically-measurable health impact and it contains thousands of times more carcinogens than ecig vapour - small amounts of all normally-encountered toxins are not significant for health. There are exceptions such as ricin, but we aren't vaping that, and polonium or ricin are exceptional by the very nature of the small doses required to cause harm. We aren't vaping plutonium, we're vaping flavoured water vapour that smells subtly of strawberry, not a fire in a tyre warehouse just downwind of Chernobyl.
3. Deliberate attempts to create a toxic result in the lab by burning up refills and representing the result as normal usage is fraud and nothing more. In fact it is dangerous fraud that is often driven by corruption. People who make such claims are lying fraudsters.
